Freshman Disorientation: What’s Safe to Read?

In June, I posted about a report published by the National Association of Scholars that was sharply critical of the summer reading assigned to incoming freshman by American colleges. Common selections—which tended toward best-selling non-fiction titles such as “Three Cups of Tea,” “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” and “The Soloist”—demonstrated, according to the report, “liberal political views; a preponderance of contemporary writing; and a surprisingly low level of intellectual difficulty.” Peter Wood, the president of the N.A.S., was also critical of what his group identified as the lack of focus on the Western tradition in favor of books, for example, about Africa.

At the time, I was less interested in the N.A.S.’s conservative political motivations than I was with their clumsy and rather absurd herding of the assigned books into categories that ranged from the overly broad (“Society/Poverty/Women,” “Multiculturalism/Immigration/Racism”) to the oddly narrow (“Rapacious Capitalism,” “Despair.”) Back in June, Wood bridled at criticism of the summer-reading report, calling out the “P.C. vigilantes” for missing the point: that the problem wasn’t politics, but instead that the books were simple-minded and just too easy to read. And in a followup, “Read These Instead: Better Books for Next Year’s Beaches,” published two weeks ago, Wood and Ashley Thorne address the categorization issue directly: “The groupings we used emerged from examining the books, and respondents who scoffed at the categories we came up with notably offered no alternatives.” Scoffed, indeed, not because the categories reveal their maker’s contempt for the subject matter (which they surely do) but because in creating such a facile framework the N.A.S. falls short of its own standards of intellectual rigor. A report that posits “Society/Poverty/Women” as a useful thematic classification makes itself ridiculous. Alternatives? Why not “The Universe/Disease/Men” as a parallel formulation?

I may not want the N.A.S. telling me what to read, but the new report—which lists thirty-seven recommended books along with six “more ambitious titles”—is admittedly a fine and varied list. The list includes both fiction (from Bunyan to Ralph Ellison) and non-fiction (Plato to Tom Wolfe) and shows a exciting breadth of cultural and intellectual interests. (The Huffington Post has a slide show of the first dozen recommendations, and a complete list can be seen here.) Its disdain for the contemporary is admirable—colleges let students off quite easily by assigning best-sellers and glorified self-help books. Less admirable, however, is its exclusion of books that are “contemptuous of humanity or dyed in profound cynicism.” The report notes that:

Some such books belong in the college curriculum but we judge them a poor welcome mat to the pre-freshmen who ought to have a somewhat more positive introduction to why colleges exist and why they are devoting time and money to the enterprise. No Samuel Beckett or H. L. Mencken here.

I disagree. Despair, contempt, and cynicism all posses essential literary merit, even if they make for somber reading at the beach. Still, their point here is both reasoned and reasonable.

Finally, and to risk being branded a “PC vigilante,” it does not escape notice that among the forty-three recommended titles, just three were written by women: Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Jane Jacobs’s “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.”

“We sought diversity—the intellectual kind,” Wood and Thorne write. They also seem to be seeking controversy.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and producer for newyorker.com. He lives in Maine.